Cassandra Clare - City of Fallen Angels

He nodded. He looked like there were a million things he wanted to say but had determined not to say them, for which she was grateful. He ran a hand through his tousled hair, rimed white with plaster dust, and nodded. “Okay.”

Silence. Jace was still leaning against the door, only now he had his forehead pressed against it, his eyes closed. Clary wondered if he even knew she was in the room with him. She took a step forward, but before she could say anything, he pushed the doors open and walked back out into the garden.

She stood still for a moment, staring after him. She could call for the elevator, of course, ride it down, wait for the Clave in the lobby with everyone else. If Jace didn’t want to talk, he didn’t want to talk. She couldn’t force him to. If Alec was right, and he was punishing himself, she’d just have to wait until he got over it.

She turned toward the elevator—and stopped. A little flame of anger licked its way through her, making her eyes burn. No, she thought. She didn’t have to let him behave like this. Maybe he could be this way to everyone else, but not to her. He owed her better than that. They owed each other better than that.

She whirled and made her way to the doors. Her ankle still ached, but the iratzes Alec had put on her were working. Most of the pain in her body had subsided to a dull, throbbing ache. She reached the doors and pushed them open, stepping onto the roof terrace with a wince as her bare feet came into contact with the freezing tiles.

She saw Jace immediately; he was kneeling near the steps, on tiles stained with blood and ichor and glittering with salt. He rose as she approached, and he turned, something shiny dangling from his hand.

The Morgenstern ring, on its chain.

The wind had come up; it blew his dark gold hair across his face. He pushed it away impatiently and said, “I just remembered that we left this here.”

His voice sounded surprisingly normal.

“Is that why you wanted to stay up here?” said Clary. “To get it back?”

He turned his hand, so the chain swung upward, his fingers closing over the ring. “I’m attached to it. It’s stupid, I know.”

“You could have said, or Alec could have stayed—”

“I don’t belong with the rest of you,” he said abruptly. “After what I did, I don’t deserve iratzes and healing and hugs and being consoled and whatever else it is my friends are going to think I need. I’d rather stay up here with him.” He jerked his chin toward the place where Sebastian’s motionless body lay in the open coffin, on its stone pedestal. “And I sure as hell don’t deserve you.”

Clary crossed her arms over her chest. “Have you ever thought about what I deserve? That maybe I deserve to get a chance to talk to you about what happened?”

He stared at her. They were only a few feet apart, but it felt as if an inexpressible gulf lay between them. “I don’t know why you would even want to look at me, much less talk to me.”

“Jace,” she said. “Those things you did—that wasn’t you.”

He hesitated. The sky was so black, the lit windows of the nearby skyscrapers so bright, it was as if they stood in the center of a net of shining jewels. “If it wasn’t me,” he said, “then why can I remember everything I did? When people are possessed, and they come back from it, they don’t remember what they did when the demon inhabited them. But I remember everything.” He turned abruptly and walked away, toward the roof garden wall. She followed him, glad for the distance it put between them and Sebastian’s body, now hidden from view by a row of hedges.

“Jace!” she called out, and he turned, his back to the wall, slumping against it. Behind him a city’s worth of electricity lit up the night like the demon towers of Alicante. “You remember because she wanted you to remember,” Clary said, catching up with him, a little breathless. “She did this to torture you as much as she did it to get Simon to do what she wanted. She wanted you to have to watch yourself hurt the people you love.”

“I was watching,” he said in a low voice. “It was as if some part of me was off at a distance, watching and screaming at myself to stop. But the rest of me felt completely peaceful and like what I was doing was right. Like it was the only thing I could do. I wonder if that’s how Valentine felt about everything he did. Like it was so easy to be right.” He looked away from her. “I can’t stand it,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here with me. You should just go.”

Instead of leaving, Clary moved to stand beside him against the wall. Her arms were already wrapped around herself; she was shivering. Finally, reluctantly, he turned his head to look at her again. “Clary . . .”

“You don’t get to decide,” she said, “where I go, or when.”

“I know.” His voice was ragged. “I’ve always known that about you. I don’t know why I had to fall in love with someone who’s more stubborn than I am.”

Clary was silent a moment. Her heart had contracted at those two words—“in love.” “All those things you said to me,” she said in a half whisper, “on the terrace at the Ironworks—did you mean them?”

His golden eyes dulled. “Which things?”

That you loved me, she almost said, but thinking back—he hadn’t said that, had he? Not the words themselves. The implication had been there. And the truth of the fact, that they loved each other, was something she knew as clearly as she knew her own name.

“You kept asking me if I would love you if you were like Sebastian, like Valentine.”

“And you said then I wouldn’t be me. Look how wrong that turned out to be,” he said, bitterness coloring his voice. “What I did tonight—”

Clary moved toward him; he tensed, but didn’t move away. She took hold of the front of his shirt, leaned in closely, and said, enunciating each word clearly, “That wasn’t you.”

“Tell that to your mother,” he said. “Tell it to Luke, when they ask where this came from.” He touched her collarbone gently; the wound was healed now, but her skin, and the fabric of her dress, were still stained darkly with blood.

“I’ll tell them,” she said. “I’ll tell them it was my fault.”

He looked at her, gold eyes incredulous. “You can’t lie to them.”

“I’m not. I brought you back,” she said. “You were dead, and I brought you back. I upset the balance, not you. I opened the door for Lilith and her stupid ritual. I could have asked for anything, and I asked for you.” She tightened her grip on his shirt, her fingers white with cold and pressure. “And I would do it again. I love you, Jace Wayland—Herondale—Lightwood—whatever you want to call yourself. I don’t care. I love you and I will always love you, and pretending it could be any other way is just a waste of time.”

A look of such pain crossed his face that Clary felt her heart tighten. Then he reached out and took her face between his hands. His palms were warm against her cheeks.

“Remember when I told you,” he said, his voice as soft as she had ever heard it, “that I didn’t know if there was a God or not, but either way, we were completely on our own? I still don’t know the answer; I only knew that there was such a thing as faith, and that I didn’t deserve to have it. And then there was you. You changed everything I believed in. You know that line from Dante that I quoted to you in the park? ‘L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle’?”

Her lips curled a little at the sides as she looked up at him. “I still don’t speak Italian.”

“It’s a bit of the very last verse from Paradiso—Dante’s Paradise. ‘My will and my desire were turned by love, the love that moves the sun and the other stars.’ Dante was trying to explain faith, I think, as an overpowering love, and maybe it’s blasphemous, but that’s how I think of the way that I love you. You came into my life and suddenly I had one truth to hold on to—that I loved you, and you loved me.”